Hester Kaplan

The afternoon I got the call about the fellowship, I had just stepped out of the eye doctor’s office where I had learned the name of the instrument that determines the need for prescription lenses: phoropter. With my eyes fully dilated, the shock of afternoon light and the blur of my altered vision seemed to affect my hearing as well and made it hard for me to understand at first what the caller from the National Endowment for the Arts was telling me. But clarity soon returned to all my senses witha terrific sharpness.

Later, I thought about how the moment in the parking light seemed to echo the process by which I’ve been working on this project, How Mark Twain Helped Me Find My Father. As a biographer, my father wrote most passionately about writers. The mystery of their lives was their creative process, which was not something to be solved but something to be lived through their words. While his biographies sought the truth of a man’s creation of identity, as a deeply private person, my father’s remained unspoken. In looking to find my father now through his creative process and his words about others, which I’m reading for the very first time, I’ve often found myself in places of bright light, shadows, and blurriness, uncertain without good glasses, and without him as my guide. So I retread, reread, reimagine, and refocus until lucidity breaks through. This is the challenge and the reward of reading and writing.

I am enormously grateful to the NEA for the time and support that will allow me to keep working for that clarity of vision.